Tag: long

  • A proper review of student maintenance is now long overdue

    A proper review of student maintenance is now long overdue

    Elsewhere on the site, Esther Stimpson, Dave Phoenix and Tony Moss explain an obvious injustice.

    Universal Credit (UC) reduces by 55p for every £1 earned as income – unless you’re one of the few students entitled to UC, where instead it is reduced by £1 for every £1 you are loaned for maintenance.

    To be fair, when Universal Credit was introduced, the income disregards in the old systems that recognised that students spend out on books, equipment and travel were rolled into a single figure of £110 a month.

    Taper rates were introduced to prevent “benefit traps” where increasing earnings led to disproportionately high reductions in support – and have gone from 65p initially, then to 67p, and now to 55p.

    But for students, there’s never been a taper rate – and that £110 for the costs of books, equipment and travel hasn’t been uprated in over 13 years. Lifelong learning my eye.

    The olden days

    The student finance system in England is full of these problems – probably the most vexing of which is the parental earnings threshold over which the system expects parents to top up to the maximum.

    It’s been set at £25,000 since 2008 – despite significant growth in nominal earnings across the economy since then. IFS says that if the threshold had been uprated since 2008, it would now be around £36,500 (46 per cent higher) in 2023/24.

    That explains how John Denham came to estimate that a third of English domiciled students would get the maximum maintenance package back in 2007. We’re now down to about 1 in 5.

    Add in the fact that the maximums available have failed to increase by inflation – especially during the post-pandemic cost of living spikes – and there’s now a huge problem.

    It’s a particular issue for what politics used to call a “squeezed middle” – the parents of students whose families would have been earning £25,000 in 2007 now have £4,000 more a year to find in today’s money.

    And thanks to the increases in the minimum wage, the problem is set to grow again – when the Student Loans Company comes to assess the income of a single parent family in full time (40 hours) work, given that’s over the £25,000 threshold, it will soon calculate that even that family has to make a parental contribution to the loan too.

    It’s not even as if the means test actually works, either.

    Principles

    How much should students get? Over twenty years ago now, the higher education minister charged by Tony Blair with getting “top-up fees” through Parliament established two policy principles on maintenance.

    The first was Charles Clarke’s aspiration to move to a position where the maintenance loan was no-longer means tested, and made available in full to all full-time undergraduates – so that students would be treated as financially independent from the age of 18.

    That was never achieved – unless you count its revival and subsequent implementation in the Diamond review in Wales some twelve years later.

    Having just received results from the Student Income and Expenditure Survey (SIES) the previous December, Clarke’s second big announcement was that from September 2006, maintenance loans would be raised to the median level of students’ basic living costs –

    The principle of the decision will ensure that students have enough money to meet their basic living costs while studying.

    If we look at the last DfE-commissioned Student Income and Expenditure Survey – run in 2021 for the first time in eight years – median living and participation costs for full-time students were £15,561, so would be £18,888 today if we used CPI as a measure.

    The maximum maintenance loan today is £10,227.

    The third policy principle that tends to emerge from student finance reviews – in Scotland, Wales and even in the Augar review of Post-18 review of education and funding – is that the value of student financial support should be linked somehow to the minimum wage.

    Augar argued that students ought to expect to combine earning with learning – suggesting that full-time students should expect to be unable to work for 37.5 hours a week during term time, and should therefore be loaned the difference (albeit with a parental contribution on a means test and assuming that PT work is possible for all students on all courses, which it plainly isn’t).

    As of September, the National Living Wage at 37.5 hours a week x 30 weeks will be £13,376 – some £2,832 more than most students will be able to borrow, and more even than students in London will be able to borrow.

    And because the Treasury centrally manages the outlay and subsidies for student loans in the devolved nations for overall “equivalence” on costs, both Scotland and Wales have now had to abandon their minimum wage anchors too.

    Diversity

    Augar thought that someone ought to look at London weighting – having not managed to do so in the several years that his project ran for, the review called London a “subject worthy of further enquiry”.

    Given that the last government failed to even respond to his chapter on maintenance, it means that no such further work has been carried out – leaving the uprating of the basic for London (+25 per cent) and the downrating for those living at home (-20 per cent) at the same level as they were in the Education (Student Loans) Regulations 1997.

    Augar also thought student parents worthy of further work – presumably not the subject of actual work because it was DfE officials, not those from the DWP, who supported his review. Why on earth, wonder policymakers, are people putting off having kids, causing a coming crisis in the working age/pensionable age ratio? It’s a mystery.

    Commuters, too. The review supported the principle that the away/home differential should be based on the different cost of living for those living at home but it “suggested a detailed study of the characteristics and in-study experience of commuter students and how to support them better.” It’s never been done. Our series would be a good place to start.

    Things are worse for postgraduates, of course. Not only does a loan originally designed to cover both now go nowhere near the cost of tuition and maintenance, the annually updated memo from the DWP (buried somewhere in the secondary legislation) on how PG loans should be treated viz a vis the benefits system still pretends that thirty per cent of the loan should be treated as maintenance “income” for the purposes of calculating benefits, and the rest considered tuition spend.

    (Just to put that into context – thirty per cent of the current master’s loan of £12,471 is £3,741. 90 credits is supposed to represent 1800 notional hours that a student is spending on studying rather than participating in the labour market. The maintenance component is worth £2.08 an hour – ie the loan is £16,851 short on maintenance alone for a year which by definition involves less vacation time).

    Carer’s Allowance is available if you provide at least 35 hours of care a week – as long as you’re not a full-time student. Free childcare for children under fives? Only if you’re not a full-time student. Pretty much all of the support available from both central government and local authorities during Covid? Full-time students excluded.

    When ministers outside of DfE give answers on any of this, they tell MPs that “the principle” is that the benefits system does not normally support full-time students, and that instead, “they are supported by the educational maintenance system.” What DWP minister Stephen Timms really means, of course, is thank god our department doesn’t have to find money for them too – a problem that will only get worse throughout the spending review.

    Whose problem?

    Back in 2004, something else was introduced in the package of concessions designed to get top-up fees through.

    As was also the case later in 2012, the government naively thought that £3,000 fees would act as an upper limit rather than a target – so Clarke announced that he would maintain fee remission at around £1,200, raise the new “Higher Education grant” for those from poorer backgrounds to £1,500 a year, and would require universities to offer bursaries to students from the poorest backgrounds to make up the difference.

    It was the thin end of a wedge. By the end of the decade, the nudging and cajoling of universities to take some of their additional “tuition” fee income and give it back to students by way of fee waivers, bursaries or scholarships had resulted in almost £200m million being spent on financial support students from lower income and other underrepresented groups – with more than 70 per cent of that figure spent on those with a household income of less than £17,910. By 2020-21 – the last time OfS bothered publishing the spend – that had doubled to £406m.

    It may not last. The principle is pretty much gone and the funding is in freefall. When I looked at this last year (via an FOI request), cash help per student had almost halved in five years – and in emerging Access and Participation Plans, providers were cutting financial support in the name of “better targeting”.

    You can’t blame them. Budgets are tight, the idea of redistributing “additional” fee income a lost concept, and the “student premium” funding given to universities to underpin that sort of support has been tumbling in value for years – from, for example, £174 per disabled student in 2018/19 to just £129 now.

    All while the responsibility for the costs to enable disabled students to access their education glide more and more onto university budgets – first via a big cut in the last decade, and now via slices of salami that see pressure piled on to staff who get the blame, but don’t have the funding to claim any credit.

    Pound in the pocket

    What about comparisons? By European standards, our core system of maintenance looks fairly generous – in this comparison of monthly student incomes via Eurostudent, for example, we’re not far off top out of 20 countries:

    But those figures in Euros are deceptive. Our students – both UG and PG – spend fewer years as full time students than in almost every other country. Students’ costs are distorted by a high proportion studying away from home – something that subject and campus rationalisation will exacerbate rather than relieve.

    And anyway, look at what happens to the chart when we adjust for purchasing power:

    How are students doing financially three years on? The Student Income and Expenditure Survey (SIES) has not been recommissioned, so even if we wanted to, we’d have no data to supply to the above exercise. The Labour Force Survey fails to capture students in (any) halls, and collects some data through parents. Households Below Average Income – the key dataset on poverty – counts tuition fee loans as income, despite my annual email to officials pointing out the preposterousness of that. How are students doing financially? We don’t really know.

    And on costs, the problems persist too. There’s no reliable data on the cost of student accommodation – although what there is always suggests that it is rising faster than headline rates of inflation. The basket of goods in CPI and RPI can’t be the same as for a typical student – but aside from individual institutional studies, the work has never been done.

    Even on things like the evaluation of the bus fare cap, published recently by the Department for Transport, students weren’t set up as a flag by the department – so are unlikely to be a focus of what’s left from that pot after the spending review. See also health, housing, work – students are always DfE’s problem.

    Student discounts are all but dead – too many people see students as people to profit from, rather than subsidise. No government department is willing to look at housing – passed between MHCLG and DfE like a hot potato while those they’d love to devolve to “other” students as economic units or nuisances, but never citizens.

    The business department is barely aware that students work part-time, and the Home Office seems to think that international students will be able to live on the figure that nobody thinks home students can live on. DfE must have done work, you suppose they suppose.

    In health, we pretend that student nurses and midwives are “supernumerary” to get them to pay us (!) to prop up our creaking NHS. And that split between departments, where DfE loans money to students for four years max, still means that we expect medical students in their final two years – the most demanding in terms of academic content and travelling full time to placements – to live on £7,500 a year. Thank god, in a way, that so few poor kids get in.

    It’s not even like we warn them. UK higher education is a £43.9 billion sector educating almost 3m students a year, professes to be interested in access and participation, and says it offers a “world-class student” experience. And yet it can’t even get its act together to work out and tell applicants how much it costs to participate in it – even in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

    Because reasons

    Why are we like this? It’s partly about statecraft. There was an obvious split between education and other departments when students were all young, middle class and carefree, and devolution gave the split a sharper edge – education funding (devolved) and benefits (reserved).

    It’s partly about participation. It’s very tempting for all involved to only judge student financial support on whether it appears to be causing (or at least correlates with) overall enrolment, participation and completion – missing all of the impacts on the quality of that participation in the process.

    Do we know what the long-term impacts are on our human capital of “full-time” students being increasingly anxious, lonely, hungry, burdened and, well, part-time? We don’t.

    Efficiency in provider budgets is about getting more students to share cheaper things – management, space, operating costs and even academics. Efficiency for students doesn’t work like that – it just means spending less and less time on being a student.

    The participation issue is also about the principal – we’ve now spent decades paying for participation expansion ambitions by pushing more and more of the long-run run cost onto graduates – so much so that there’s now little subsidy in the system left.

    And now that the cost of borrowing the money to lend to students is through the roof, increases in the outlay look increasingly impossible.

    Lifelong moaning

    But something will have to give soon. Some five years after Boris Johnson gave a speech at Exeter College announcing his new Lifetime Skills Guarantee, there’s still no news on maintenance – only ever a vague “maintenance loan to cover living costs for courses with in-person attendance” to accompany the detailed tables of credits that get chunked down from the FT £9,535.

    The LLE was partly a product of Augar (more on that on Wonk Corner) – who said that maintenance support should be reserved for those studying at a minimum level of intensity – 25 per cent (15 ECTS a year), and then scaled by credit.

    But think about that for a moment, setting aside that increasingly arbitrary distance learning differential. Why would a student studying for 45 credits only get 3/4 of an already inadequate loan? Will students studying on one of those accelerated degrees get 1.5 x the loan?

    The centrality of credit to the LLE – and its potential use in determining the level of student financial support for their living and participation costs – is fascinating partly because of the way in which a row between the UK and other member states played out back in 2008.

    When ECTS was being developed, we (ie the UK) argued that the concept focused too heavily on workload as the primary factor for assigning credits. We said that credits should be awarded based on the actual achievement of learning outcomes, rather than simply the estimated workload.

    That was partly because the UK’s estimate at the time of 1,200 notional learning hours (derived from an estimate of 40 hours’ notional learner effort a week, multiplied by 30 weeks) was the lowest in Europe, and much lower than the 1,500-1,800 hours that everyone else in Europe was estimating.

    Annex D of 2006’s Proposals for national arrangements for the use of academic credit in higher education in England: The Final report of the Burgess Group put that down to the UK having shorter teaching terms and not clocking what students do in their breaks:

    It could be argued that considerably more learner effort takes place during the extended vacations and that this is not taken into account in the total NLH for an academic year.

    Those were the days.

    In the end an EU fudge was found allowing the UK to retain its 20 notional hours – with a stress that “how this is applied to a range of learning experiences at a modular or course level will differ according to types of delivery, subject content and student cohorts” and the inclusion of “time spent in class, directed learning, independent study and assessment.”

    A bit like with fees and efficiency, if in the mid noughties it was more likely that students were loaned enough to live on, were posh, had plenty of spare time and had carefree summers, that inherent flex meant that a student whose credit was more demanding than the notional hours could eat into their free time to achieve the learning outcomes.

    But once you’ve got a much more diverse cohort of students who are much more likely to need to be earning while learning, you can’t really afford to be as flexible – partly because if you end up with a student whose characteristics and workload demand, say, 50 hours a week, and a funding system that demands 35 hours’ work a week, once you sleep for 8 hours a night you’re left with less than 4 hours a day to do literally anything else at all.

    Think of it this way. If it turns out that in order to access the full maintenance loan, you have to enrol onto 60 ECTS a year (the current “full-time” position), we are saying to students that you must enrol onto credits theoretically totalling at the very very least 1,200 hours of work a year. We then loan them – as a maximum – £8.52 an hour (outside London, away from home). No wonder they’re using AI – they need to eat.

    If it then turns out that you end up needing to repeat a module or even a year, the LLE will be saying “we’ve based the whole thing on dodgy averages from two decades ago – and if you need to take longer or need more goes at it, you’ll end up in more debt, and lose some of your 4 years’ entitlement in the process”. Charming.

    A credit system whose design estimated notional learning hours around students two decades ago, assumed that students have the luxury of doing lots of stuff over the summer, and fessed up that it’s an unreliable way of measuring workload is not in any world a sensible way to work out how much maintenance and participation cost support to loan to a student.

    Pretty much every other European country – if they operate loans, grants or other entitlements for students – regards anyone studying more than 60 (or in some cases, 75) credits as studying “full-time”.

    That allows students to experience setbacks, to accumulate credit for longer, to take time out for a bereavement or a project or a volunteering opportunity – all without the hard cliff edges of “dropping out”, switching to “part-time” or “coming back in September”. Will our student finance system ever get there? Don’t bet on it.

    If the work (on workload) isn’t done, we’ll be left with definitions of “full-time” and “part-time” student that are decades old – such that a full-time student at the OU can’t get a maintenance loan, while an FT UG at a brick university that barely attends in-person can – that pretty much requires students to study for more credit than they can afford to succeed in.

    Oh – and if the loan is chunked down for a 30 credit module, how will the government prevent fraud?

    Via an FOI request, the SLC tells me that last year, almost 13,000 students FT students in England and Wales managed to pull down installment 1 of their loan without their provider pulling down installment 1 of the fee loan. Anyone that thinks that’s all employer funding will shortly be getting my brochure on bridges.

    Maintenance of a problem

    Our system for student living and participation costs may, by comparison with other systems, appear to be a generous one – especially if you ignore the low number of years that students are in it, and how much they eventually pay back. But make no mistake – our student finance system is completely broken – set up for a different sector with different students that has no contemporary basis in need, ambition or impact.

    Its complexity could not be less helpful for driving opportunity, its paucity is likely to be choking our stock of human (and social) capital (and resultant economic growth), and its immediate impacts have normalised food banks on campus – real poverty that universities neither can nor should be expected to alleviate with other students’ fees and debt.

    The signals and signs are of danger ahead – a minister keen to stress that the “fundamentals” of the system we have for funding higher education won’t change reminds us both of a lack of money and a bandwidth issue. It’s one whose solution requires real research, cross-departmental and nations working, and a proper sense of what we want students to be, experience and learn. Sadly, that also sounds like a solution that lends itself to long grass.

    Given everything else going on in the world right now, maybe that’s inevitable. But decade after decade, every time we put off a proper review, or over-prioritise university rather than student funding in the debates, we dodge the difficult questions – because they’re too complex, because the data isn’t there, because it’s another department’s problem, because reasons.

    If Bridget Phillipson is serious about “fixing the foundations” to “secure the future of higher education” so that “students can benefit from a world-class education for generations to come”, she needs to commission a dedicated student maintenance review. Now.

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  • Short term Trump and long term trends (Bryan Alexander)

    Short term Trump and long term trends (Bryan Alexander)

    Here I look into the past month of Trump’s actions and see how they might shape long-term trends. Specifically I touch on demographics, climate change, populism, technology, and a bit more. It’s a weird way to celebrate my birthday, but hopefully a productive one.

     

     

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  • Student Aid in Canada: The Long View

    Student Aid in Canada: The Long View

    Note: this is a short version of a paper which has just appeared in issue 72:4 the Canadian Tax Journal. How short? I’m trying for under 1000 words. Let’s see how I do.

    Canadian student aid programs existed in scattered forms since just after World War I but became a “national program” when the Dominion-Canadian Student Aid Program (DCSAP) was created in 1939. Under this program, the Government of Canada provided block cash grants to provinces who administered their own scholarship programs which provided aid based on some combination of need and merit. The actual details of the program varied significantly from one province to another; at the time, the government of Canada did not place much importance on “national programs” with common elements.

    In 1964, this DCSAP was replaced by the Canada Student Loans Program (CSLP)—recently re-named the Canada Student Financial Assistance Program (CSFAP). This has always been a joint federal-provincial enterprise. But where the earlier program was a block grant, this program would be a single national entity run more or less consistently across all provinces, albeit with provincial governments still in place as responsible administrative agencies able to supplement the plan as they wished. Some provinces would opt out of this program and received compensation to run their own solo programs (Quebec at the program’s birth, the Northwest Territories in 1984 and Nunavut in 1999). The others, for the most part, built grant programs that kicked in once a student had exhausted their Canada Student Loan eligibility.

    Meanwhile, a complimentary student aid program grew up in the tax system, mainly because it was a way to give money to students that didn’t involve negotiations with provinces. Tuition fees plus a monthly education amount were made into a tax deduction in 1961 and then converted to a tax credit in 1987. Registered Education Savings Plans (RESPs), which are basically tax-free growth savings accounts, showed up in 1971.

    Although the CSLP was made somewhat more generous over time in order to keep up with rising student costs, program rules went largely unchanged between 1964 and 1993. Then, during the extremely short Kim Campbell government, a new system came into being. The federal government decided to make loans much larger, but also to force provinces in participating provinces to start cost-sharing in a different manner—basically, they had to step up from a student’s first dollar of need instead of just taking students with high need. Since this was the era of stupidly high deficits, provinces responded to these additional responsibilities by cutting the generosity of their programs, transforming from pure grants to forgivable loans. For the rest of the decade, student debt rose—in some cases quite quickly: in total loans issued doubled between 1993 and 1997.

    And then, everything went into reverse.

    In a series of federal budgets between 1996 and 2000, billions of dollars were thrown into grants, tax credits and a new program called “Canada Education Savings Grants,” which were a form of matching grant for contributions to RESPs. Grants and total aid rose; loans issued fell by a third, mainly between 1997 and 2001 (a recovering economy helped quite a bit). Tax expenditures soared, which due to a rule change allowing tax credits to be carried forward meant either students got to keep more of their work income or got to reduce their taxes once they started working.

    Since this period of rapid change at the turn of the century, student aid has doubled in real terms. And nearly all of that has been an increase in non-repayable aid. Institutional scholarships? Tripled. Education scholarships? Quadrupled. Loans? They are up, too, but there the story is a bit more complicated.

    Figure 1: Student Aid by Source, Canada, 1993-94 to 2022-23, in thousands of constant $2022

    For the period from about 2000 to 2015, all forms of aid were increasing at about inflation plus 3%. Then, in 2016, we entered another period of rapid change. The Governments of Canada and Ontario eliminated a bunch of tax credits and re-invested the money into grants. Briefly, this led to targeted free tuition in Ontario, before the Ford government took an axe to the system. Then, COVID hit and the CSFAP doubled grants. Briefly, in 2020-21, total student aid exceeded $23 billion/year (the figure above does not include the $4 billion per year paid out through the Canada Emergency Student Benefit), with less than 30% of it made up of loans.

    One important thing to understand about all this is that while the system became much larger and much less loan-based, something else was going on, too. It was becoming much more federal. Over the past three decades, provincial outlays have risen about 30% in real terms; meanwhile, federal ones have quadrupled. In the early 1990s, the system was about 45-55 federal-provincial; now, it’s about 70-30 federal. It’s a stunning example of “uploading” of responsibilities in an area of shared-jurisdiction.

    Figure 2: Government Student Aid by Source, Figure 1: Student Aid by Source, Canada, 1993-94 to 2022-23, in thousands of constant $2022

    So there you go: a century of Canadian student aid in less than 850 words. Hope you enjoyed it.

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  • Rachel Reeves and the Oxford-Cambridge Arc: Right time. Right place. Long live the Growth Corridor!

    Rachel Reeves and the Oxford-Cambridge Arc: Right time. Right place. Long live the Growth Corridor!

    The idea of a growth corridor between Oxford and Cambridge announced today is not new. Our region was fortunate with the announcements today: being ready, and in the right place at the right time armed with a good piece of policy background from Public First and Rachel Wolf.   

    While it has had many changes of name and cast, the idea of connecting this region has been around for at least 25 years. The idea has waxed and waned as it has acted as the poster child for Coalition, Tory and now Labour governments. It is estimated the Corridor could boost the economic contribution of the region by up to £78 billion, so has formed the centrepiece of the speech on growth given by Chancellor, Rachel Reeves. The Chancellor is going for growth in the Oxford-to-Cambridge Growth Corridor (formerly known as the Corridor, Arc, Region and now Corridor) with the ingredients of world-class companies with world-class talent and research and development.  

    It may even feel as if the Arc Universities Group – ‘working together towards inclusive and sustainable economic growth in an area of designated national economic significance’ – was formed in 2018 in anticipation of such a moment. This is a very long-term project which promises to bear fruit in 30-to-50 years. Universities are able to understand and span such timeframes. My own involvement, for a mere seven years, is transitory and many others have come and gone.  

    The universities in our region, and the relationships that they enjoy with industry and others, have played a pivotal role. There are several reasons for this, including:  

    1. We have been able to act as the honest broker and use our convening power to bring together people and conversations.  
    2. There has been a lot to learn as we face adaptive and existential challenges and these are the stock of universities.  
    3. We are largely independent in our actions, able to tell it how it is, free from the pressures of the electoral cycle or the vicissitudes of policy change. 
    4. Our universities have maturity of governance and stability of leadership, with vice-chancellors serving for at least five years, whereas Secretaries of State sometimes last only a few weeks. 
    5. The region, like many others, hosts a great diversity of institutions. The missions of our members are complementary  in their offering.  
    6. There is significant scale and influence with universities often being the biggest employers. With the benefit of money from the Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF), we have been able to act quickly and take risks that others have not and we have been able to hold the space while other processes catch up. 
    7. We have developed a great interface with industry and the private sector. 
    8. Partnerships: Perhaps the most valuable outcome of working in the wings for so many years is the alliances that have been formed between actors. We have formed a strategic alliance with East West Rail, with the private sector and with the sub-regional transport body, as well as the pan-regional partnership.  
    9. More recently we have cemented the relationship between universities and the private sector, in the formation of the Supercluster Board. 

    As our Chair, Alistair Fitt, the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University and Chair of the Arc Universities Group, has reflected: 

    This region hosts a great diversity and scale of universities. Together we offer a wide range of key contributions: globally renowned research brilliance, the powerhouse of skills provision provided by cutting edge teaching, world-class knowledge transfer and commercialisation. Our universities, working in close partnership, in alliance with others – particular the private sector – are organised into the Arc Universities Group. We stand ready for the challenge. We welcome the oversight and experience that the leadership of Sir Patrick Vallance brings to the region, and we look forward to helping deliver the Chancellor’s aspirations for growth.

    The Supercluster Board (SCB) has been formed to ensure the UK can achieve its ambition to become a science and technology superpower. The SCB comprises a group of globally recognised scientific enterprises, investors and world-leading universities alongside the local enterprise partnerships, all of which have a vested interest in the region and will seek to work constructively with a wide range of stakeholders, including the UK Government, to deliver on the ambition for the Oxford-Cambridge Growth Corridor. 

    There is significant representation on this new group, with four university representatives on the main board, including Alistair Fitt, and with an expert panel comprising all the vice-chancellors or their near proxy. It is the private sector voice that has succeeded in landing the message about the region’s potential with Rachel Reeves.  

    I’m grateful to the many colleagues who have kept the faith. It is not always been easy, especially given the recent financial constraints, but the future looks promising and we can be greatly encouraged by the Chancellor’s recognition of the potential. The next challenge will be to see how we all deliver under the sudden power of the spotlight that will inevitably follow the announcements.  

    The photo accompanying this blog on the HEPI website is taken from https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/oxford-cambridge-arc/oxford-cambridge-arc

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  • LA Schools Reopen, But Recovery Will Be Long and Painful – The 74

    LA Schools Reopen, But Recovery Will Be Long and Painful – The 74


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    It was just after 1 am when Los Angeles charter school superintendent Ian Mcfeat started getting text messages and phone calls at a relative’s house where he was sheltering from the fires. 

    His neighbors said his house was burning down in the wildfires – along with his entire Altadena neighborhood of Los Angeles.

    Aveson School of Leaders, which McFeat runs and where his kids attended school just three blocks from his house, was also burning.

    Unable to sleep, Mcfeat drove away from his in-law’s house that he’d been evacuated to and made the drive back to Altadena.

    He drove through the fire lines and into his neighborhood to see if he could salvage anything, save anyone, or put out the fires that had raged on the east side for more than 48 hours straight, and decimated the Palisades in the west. 

    He was greeted with a scene out of a horror movie. Fueled by a violent windstorm and piles of brush left from a particularly wet winter last year, the firestorm was like a tornado shooting flames, blasting through his neighborhood.

    “It was like driving through a bomb scene,” said Mcfeat. “There were homes exploding. I probably shouldn’t have been there.” 

    Despite the devastating losses, Mcfeat can’t imagine not rebuilding his home and school right where they were in Altadena. But the road to recovery will be a long and painful one.

    “No doubt about it. We are going to rebuild,” said Mcfeat. Aveson has started a GoFundMe. At this point, a new site for the school has not been identified. The district hasn’t been able to help them yet.

    “I don’t know what we’re going to do,” said Mcfeat.

    The wildfires that burned Los Angeles this month are the costliest and most destructive in the city’s history, displacing more than 150,000 residents and killing at least 25 people. Two massive blazes fed by windstorms, the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire, simultaneously scorched the city from the sea to the mountains, filling the air with vast plumes of ash and smoke.

    As the wind and flames began to retreat last week, and firefighters gained control of the fires, schools began to reopen. And the kids began to return to class.

    The Los Angeles Unified School District, which is by far the largest district of about 80 in Los Angeles County, resumed instruction Monday after being totally closed since last Thursday. Seven schools remain shut because they’re located in evacuation zones. Another three won’t reopen because their buildings were badly burned or destroyed in the fires.  

    Dozens of much smaller districts in Los Angeles County also reopened this week, with the exceptions of two districts, Pasadena Unified, which encompasses Altadena, and La Cañada Unified, which neighbors Altadena to the west. 

    The Eaton fire has destroyed at least five schools but was mostly contained by Friday. 

    Kids from two of the LAUSD schools that burned in the Palisades, Marquez Charter Elementary School and Palisades Charter Elementary School, were placed, with intact school rosters, in close-ish LAUSD school buildings that already had other schools in them.

    The students who attended the burned schools were given their own entrances, classrooms and courtyards for kids to play. When parents dropped them off at class this week, there were a lot of tearful reunions.

    Families from Palisades Charter were somber, but excited to return to normalcy with their new space located inside of Brentwood Science Magnet School.  

    Joseph Koshki, a parent from the Palisades whose son attends third grade at Palisades Charter, walked holding hands with his son to their new classroom at Brentwood Science, which had been stacked with balloons.

    “When he saw his school burned on the news he was crying for days,” Koshki said of his child. “But when he heard that he was going to his new school with his old friends, he was so happy”.

    Nina Belden, a parent of a Palisades Charter student who had made an emergency evacuation from her house in the Palisades with her family, said it was important for the students at her daughter’s school to stay together and receive in-person instruction.

    “We were worried they were going to do something like remote learning,” said Beldon.

    Marquez Charter, which also burned in the Palisades fire, has a long history in the community, having opened in 1955 when the Palisades still had a frontier feel, before the neighborhood became a favorite of Hollywood stars and media execs.

    For Victoria Flores, who works as a paraeducator at Marquez, the school is part of her family. Flores went to Marquez when she was in elementary school, and her mother works in the cafeteria.

    “It was my home away from home. We are devastated by what happened,” Flores said.

    But Flores said she and the rest of the staff were glad to be relocated together at a LAUSD school called Nora Sterry, about ten miles from the burned Marquez campus.

    “We are a really close family,” said Flores. “That’s helped us a lot.”

    Upstairs at Nora Sterry, Clare Gardner’s class had about eight of twenty students show up on the first day of relocation.

    Her third-grade class was playing with clay and Mrs. Gardner, who is a twenty-seven-year veteran of Marquez, held back her tears as she helped students arrive into class.

    “We always call it the Marquez family,” Gardner said as the children greeted each other.

    One boy in Mrs. Gardner’s class said he was happy to be around his friends and teacher but sad about his classroom fish and books, which were lost in the fire.

    Later in the morning, LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho went to visit parents at Nora Sterry.

    After nearly a week off school, Carvalho says attendance is still below normal.

    “I think where that attendance is lacking is in schools that were directly affected” by the fires, Carvalho said.

    Also hurting attendance, Carvalho said, is the fact that many families are enduring temporary relocations, while others lack stable housing entirely.

    LAUSD staff attendance is back to normal, he said, while student attendance is about 88% — down from an average of about 90%, representing about 10,000 fewer students than normal.

     “As conditions of the families begin to normalize and stabilize, those [attendance] numbers will rise,” said Carvalho.

    For other schools in other areas of Los Angeles, recovery may be longer in the making. 

    Bonnie Brinecomb, principal of Odyssey Charter School – South in Altadena, which burned to the ground in the Eaton Fire, estimates that the homes of 40% of the students enrolled in the school also burned.

    Families and school staffers are scrambling to ensure displaced families have food, shelter and clothing, Brinecomb said. Some students are turning up for daycare at a nearby Boys and Girls Club that offered to take them in.  

    Brinecomb said Odyssey has partnered with McFeat’s school Aveson to search for new facilities. But the double loss of students’ homes and the schools’ campuses is a gutpunch.  

    “It’s just heartbreak. Pure shock,” she said. “You don’t even process how bad of a situation just happened.”

    Like Aveson, Odyssey has launched an online fundraiser and Brinecomb says the school will rebuild. How long that will take, though, remains an open question.  

    From the perspective of displaced children and families, the faster things return to normal, the better, said Dr. Frank Manis, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Southern California. 

    The experience of trauma can intensify if routines are disrupted for longer periods, and the intensity of the disruption matters as well, said Manis. Kids who lost their homes to fires may have a harder time bouncing back than those who only lost their schools, he said.    

    “It’s sort of on that spectrum of wartime PTSD, but not as bad,” said Manis. “So what it could lead to is nightmares, difficulty sleeping, and emotional or behavior problems that can last for quite a while.”

    Children fighting post-traumatic stress from the fires may become withdrawn, or act out in class, said Manis. But mostly, he said, the research from past natural disasters shows that even children badly impacted by the fires may begin to feel normal within a few months. 

    “Kids are pretty resilient,” said Manis. “But trauma can disappear for a while, and then it can resurface later. When everyone’s forgotten how bad it was, it can resurface.” 


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  • Turbulent times require both immediate and long views

    Turbulent times require both immediate and long views

    I don’t remember where I heard this bit of wisdom, if I read it in a book or someone else told it to me, but it’s something I’ve carried around for a while now: There’s always going to be a next, until there isn’t.

    My interpretation is a kind of combination of “this too shall pass” with “time marches on,” along with a reminder of the certainty that at some point all things and all people cease to exist.

    (I find that last bit sort of comforting, but maybe I’m weird that way.)

    It comes in handy when thinking about both exciting and difficult times. What is happening in a moment is not eternal, and something else will be coming along. In order to make that next thing as positive and beneficial as possible, we have to deal with both the present and those possible futures.

    I think this mindset might be helpful to anyone who is considering the coming couple of years for higher education and bracing for the possible impact of a presidential administration that appears hostile to the work of colleges and universities and intends to bring this perceived hostile group to heel. I’m concerned that many institutions are not considering that there’s always going to be a next, and short-term accommodations are going to result in long-term problems.

    What comes next will be far worse than it needs to be.

    It’s strange to think that institutions that are so well established with such long histories should act with such fragility in the face of present uncertainty, but there are signs of what scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder calls “obeying in advance” everywhere.

    As reported by IHE’s Ryan Quinn, Texas A&M, along with other public higher ed institutions in the state, following threats ginned up by right-wing conservative billionaire-backed activist Christopher Rufo, has ended their participation in the PhD Project, a conference meant to help increase the number of doctoral students identifying as “Black, African American, Latino, Hispanic American, Native American or Canadian Indigenous.”

    The institutions had previously participated for a number of years but have now rescinded their sponsorship because of Texas law SB 17, banning DEI programs at public universities. Texas governor Greg Abbott threatened to fire A&M president Mark Welsh. Welsh folded, issuing a statement that said, “While the proper process for reviewing and approving attendance at such events was followed, I don’t believe we fully considered the spirit of our state law in making the initial decision to participate. We need to be sure that attendance at those events is aligned with the very clear guidance we’ve been given by our governing bodies.”

    The intention behind these attacks by Rufo and his backers is to, essentially, resegregate higher education under an entirely twisted definition of “fairness.” This point of view is ascendant, as multiple states have banned so-called DEI initiatives, and the rolling back of affirmative action in college admissions has already resulted in a decline in Black first-year students, something most pronounced at “elite” institutions.

    So, this is now, but in acting this way now, what’s likely to be next? Will Texas A&M regress to a de facto policy of segregation? Is this healthy for the institution, for the state of Texas?

    I grant that it is possible that a program of resegregation is consistent with the desires of a majority of the state’s citizens and the elected legislators are simply reflecting the desire of their constituency. If so, so be it … I guess. I wonder how long the institutions can last when it allows Chris Rufo or Elon Musk or Charlie Kirk or any other outside individual or group to dictate its policies. Is this a good precedent for whatever is next?

    There’s going to be a next. What happens now will give shape to what that next might be. I worry that the folks making decisions believe there is only the now, not the next.

    Thankfully, most of us do not have to make consequential decisions that impact many people working in large institutions, but we can use this framing in considering our individual fates as well.

    In a couple of weeks my next book, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, will be in the world. I’ve invested a lot in this book, not just time and effort, but some measure of my hopes for my career and the impact my ideas may have on the world of writing and teaching writing.

    It is a fraught thing to invest too much into something like a single book. Books fail to launch all the time, as I’ve experienced personally … more than once. Finding the balance between investing sufficient effort to take advantage of the now, while also recognizing that I will have to do something next, has been a bit tricky, but necessary.

    Maybe what’s next will be closely related to the now: more speaking, more workshops related to my vision for teaching writing, a truly tangible impact on how we collectively discuss these issues after being more of a gadfly and voice in the woods. But also, maybe this is closer to the end of a cycle that started with a previous book.

    To calm my worries, I spend time thinking about what would be next if 50 percent or even 90 percent of what I now do for my vocation and income dried up. This is what I did when it became clear that teaching off the tenure track was not going to continue to be a viable way forward—a process that has put me in this moment.

    Imagining a next, I think I would call my local School of Rock and see if they needed someone to teach kids the drums, and I also would get to work on a novel that’s been rolling around my head. I picture that possible next, and while there is a sadness that what I’m hoping to achieve now did not come to fruition, I can also envision real pleasure in that other path.

    To preserve their essential mission, institutions must be prepared for turbulence and change by knowing there will be a next. To survive in this time, individuals must both be present in the now and consider what might have to happen next.

    Not easy, but always necessary.

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  • The Migration Advisory Committee thinks about skills and long term net migration

    The Migration Advisory Committee thinks about skills and long term net migration

    The Migration Advisory Committee’s annual report for 2023 ended up being one of the publications with most policy influence on the subsequent year.

    Though it was released the week after then Home Secretary James Cleverly announced a review of the Graduate route, it clearly reflected ongoing Whitehall discussions and concerns over the post-study work visa, and much of its conclusions ended up being quoted incessantly through the subsequent debate around the MAC review – especially by those in favour of the route’s abolition or restriction:

    The graduate route may not be attracting the global talent anticipated, with many students likely entering low-wage roles.

    Our concern that the graduate visa would incentivise demand for short Master’s degrees based on the temporary right to work in the UK, rather than primarily on the value of qualification, may well be borne out in the trends that we have observed.

    As we have already shown, the rise in student numbers is almost entirely focused on taught Master’s degrees, and the growth has been fastest in less selective and lower cost universities. The rise in the share of dependants is also consistent with this.

    Given all that, it’s probably a relief to all concerned that the 2024 edition of the MAC annual report doesn’t go in depth on any international student-related issue, reflecting what feels like a (welcome) period of stasis in visa policy affecting higher education under the new government.

    Nevertheless, the MAC has a beefed up role under Labour – additional civil servant resource, plus we now learn that chair Brian Bell’s role will move from two to five days a week – and this time around the questions percolating away are worthy of some long-term thinking, even if they are not going to lead to knee-jerk policy decisions.

    Staying or going

    The annual review kicks off with consideration of long-term net migration trends, noting that the general election saw all main parties commit to bringing headline figures down.

    Thinking ahead, it notes:

    In the long run, work routes will have a greater impact on net migration compared to study routes as a greater percentage of those on the work route stay in the UK, whilst students are more likely to emigrate when they finish their course. Put simply, whilst students increase net migration in the year they arrive, they will reduce it by the same amount if and when they leave.

    This is a helpful soundbite for the sector, after last month’s ONS figures started to make clear what has been evident for a while – that historic claims around the “vast majority” of international students leaving the UK after completing their courses no longer hold much water. The ONS net migration stats estimated that the proportion of those on student visas who had transitioned to another visa three years after arriving was 48 per cent for those who arrived in year ending June 2021. This was up from nine per cent for those who arrived in June 2019, largely driven by introduction of the Graduate route.

    But the detail is still uncertain, as the MAC goes on to acknowledge. It cites recent Migration Observatory modelling (director Madeleine Sumption is now the MAC deputy chair) which estimates that the “stay rate” after eight years is around 26 per cent for those on study visas, compared to 56 per cent for those on work visas. The consequence of this is that – again, according to the Migration Observatory’s heavily caveated modelling – is that student visas contribute to 19 per cent of long-term net migration.

    (The modelling also lets you adjust the assumptions around stay rate and annual international student numbers – the baseline is rather simplistically 250,000 new student visas every year from 2024 to 2032, though to be fair recent volatility means that putting a firm prediction on international recruitment is a brave bet in itself.)

    All in all the MAC notes that stay rates are “highly uncertain” – but it’s an issue that will continue to inform the wider political debate, especially as the post-pandemic bulge is gradually smoothed out of net numbers. It’s notable in this context that think tank Labour Together – which typically has the ear of the government – has just put out a proposal for a “national migration plan” based on nationally set targets for different routes. Student visas, it says, would only be included in the analysis “to the extent that they have an impact on long-run net migration” through the Graduate and Skilled Worker visa routes.

    The skills puzzle

    The central piece of this year’s review is driven by the observation that the new government’s intention is “to more closely link migration and skills policy.” Given that starting point, the MAC carefully explores to what extent this can work. It’s of course written in the careful language you would expect of a government-sponsored committee with a Home Office secretariat, but reading between the lines there’s a cautionary note to it all (and not just in the observation that “skills” is an “ambiguous term both conceptually and empirically” – don’t tell Jacqui Smith).

    “In theory”, MAC observes, skills shortages lead employers to recruit using the immigration system. “If this were true,” the government can bring down work-related immigration via the reduction of skills shortages.

    In practice, there are some complications. Most obviously, skills investments take a long time to translate to the labour market – the last government repeatedly took the quicker route of facilitating international recruitment, especially in the health and care sectors, but also in not insignificant ways in areas like filling teacher vacancies.

    The MAC also stresses how employers will not deliberately make choices around whether to hire UK-based workers or those from overseas (speaking to The Times, Brian Bell specifically points to academic recruitment as an area where employers – universities – would not change their hiring practices if the domestic labour force had better qualifications). We are also told that labour demand and supply are not independent (“employers look for what they think they can get, and employees try to match what employers want”), and that skills aside there are other differences between domestic and international recruits.

    For the construction industry, this latter point was vividly illustrated by the Financial Times last week, which argued that many businesses in this field prefer “pay-by-the-day” labour and self-employed staff, and hence hire internationally and typically not via skilled worker routes – another consequence of this is that they are unlikely to commit to training apprentices. (The article also cites Brian Bell saying that high net migration leads to “real strains on our ability to manage housing and infrastructure,” in case anyone was thinking the MAC will take a more dovish approach under Labour.)

    All in all, bringing about a join-up between the skills and migration systems is a tough ask – or, more cynically, an unrealistic policy goal. It’s clear that the MAC is trying to temper expectations about what can be achieved:

    Linking immigration and skills policy is not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach and it is important to consider the individual circumstances within sectors and occupations, including diagnosing whether shortages are genuinely driven by a lack of skills or are due to poor pay and conditions of certain roles.

    And the elephant in the room is pay. In the care sector, the MAC has repeatedly stressed that wages need a significant uplift for other visa-related tinkering to have an impact. It stresses this again here, and makes the point that a large proportion of work visas go to public sector workers.

    This is a point for Skills England to take on board as well, you would hope. Its initial report was notably incurious about the role of low pay (especially in the public sector) in driving “skills mismatches”, rather presenting employment more as a simple supply and demand relationship between skills available and skills needed. The MAC annual report has some more persuasive analysis here, showing a lack of correlation between so-called “skills shortage vacancies” (SSVs) and skilled worker visa usage. That is to say, it’s by no means a given that those industries facing skills shortages are the ones more likely to sponsor workers from overseas. There are all kinds of factors at play.

    Quad to the rescue

    You get the sense that the team of economists who make up the Migration Advisory Committee are being careful about the government’s plans to link up skills and migration in a coherent way (it’s also noted at one point that skills is devolved and immigration is not – another challenge).

    What we’re getting to make this all fit together is a new “Quad framework” (I believe this is the first time it’s publicly been referred to in this way). As promised in Labour’s manifesto, the strengthened MAC will be working with the newly launched Industrial Strategy Council, the Department for Work and Pensions, and Skills England – the manifesto in fact promised “skills bodies across the UK”, but this hasn’t been fleshed out yet.

    This Quad will cooperate “to address systemic long-term issues that have led to reliance from certain sectors on international recruitment, and where appropriate, to reduce that reliance.” The MAC anticipates that the Quad will help identify priority sectors (following the industrial strategy, when ready) and determine which have a high reliance on migration, after which the MAC will – if it sees fit – recommend policy levers the government might pull, while Skills England will be drawing up workforce and skills plans, of some sort.

    It’s all a recipe for an incredibly complicated set of moving parts, and given Skills England’s involvement and the importance of overseas staff and student recruitment, one that the English higher education sector would be wise to keep an eye on and work out how it can contribute to.

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